The venture boom that funneled billions of dollars into life sciences companies last year included a big surge in first-time deals, according to a fresh analysis of the numbers for 2014. And the boom in venture investing looks set to continue well into 2015.

The deal gives Novartis access to the most active digital health VC team--Rock Health reports Qualcomm Ventures has struck 21 deals since 2011--and further strengthens the ties between the two companies.

Drug delivery specialist Genisphere announced that it has raised $2 million in private funding to advance its 3DNA nanotechnology platform through collaborations with pharma companies. The funders are existing investors including Corporate Fuel Partners.

After weeks of increasingly confident media speculation, Google has confirmed it is setting up an outpost of its venture capital wing in Europe. And with a brief to follow a similar strategy to the U.S. team that invested in Flatiron Health, DNAnexus and other biotech IT startups, the $100 million fund is a new source of capital for European life science innovators.

The VC industry turned in bleak numbers for biotech deal-making in the first quarter of 2013, with one key measure of early-stage activity in the life science sector falling to its lowest level in almost 18 years.

The buzz on the tech beat was that information giant Elsevier was nearing a buyout of the startup Mendeley, which has an open platform for scientists to share information. Sources place the price tag for Mendeley at around $100 million.

The do-more-with-less mentality is alive and well in biotech. Atlas Venture Development Corp., a unit of the VC firm Atlas Venture, has shown again that a skeleton crew of full-time staff can run a drug development program on a tight budget with the help of outside contracts.

Humans harbor more than 10,000 microbes that number in the trillions, and sequencing the genomes of the species promises to unlock a wealth of data for biotech entrepreneurs to use in search of new drugs and diagnostics. Now companies have a baseline case for what the sum of microbes in healthy humans should look like.